


To the Flowers

by TundrainAfrica



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Long-Distance Relationship, Love Letters, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29676165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TundrainAfrica/pseuds/TundrainAfrica
Summary: "When the words started to hold meaning, when the idioms and the overly tacky word choices started to make sense to Levi, when they had started to paint pictures in his head, make him feel things he had sworn he never felt before, Levi did come across one revelation that washed over him so violently, as if taking advantage of the loud yet monotonous homily of the priest in front of him and the stillness of the people that surrounded him.Words are freedom."Towards the end of the Spanish occupation, Levi a young farmer forms an unlikely correspondence with a homesick student in Europe.
Relationships: Levi Ackerman/Hange Zoë
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15
Collections: Tumblr Prompts and Oneshots (Tundrainafrica)





	To the Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arekxandura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arekxandura/gifts).



> This is so self indulgent. I am sorry. I had foreign readers in mind as well when I wrote this and I at least tried to add exposition so at least foreign readers can enjoy it too? (if anybody else is into this sort of thing.) I have five chapters in mind for this. Will probably get to this after I finish my other WIPs, will mark this though as finished until I decide to tackle it as a WIP again.
> 
> Prompt: I am but a humble tumblr moot requesting for a Levihan Filipino!AU wherein Hange is an ilustrado and Levi is a farmer (who becomed a member of the Katipunan)
> 
> I wrote this to Pagtingin by Ben&Ben (Thanks for the ask anon)

The moment Levi realized he was trapped had been anticlimactic. Yet at the same time it had been a moment he would never forget.

Maybe because he had noticed it then in a silent yet crowded room. The people were all silent, some eyes were closed, some eyes looked bored, some other pairs of eyes were too focused on the missalettes in front of them.

All mouths were unmoving,

Except one mouth. And the mouth was moving fast, the voice coming out of it a little too loud and Levi could have sworn he could hear saliva gurgling as the voice spoke.

But nobody minded. The priest was the only one who was supposed to be speaking anyway. He spoke loudly yet comfortably as if he had been making those lectures his entire life. The words of the homily echoed across the room, maybe even appended by the fact that the priest stood on a platform a few feet higher than the tallest person in the church.

He talked about eternal salvation, indulgencias to guarantee a place in heaven, sins and commandments. He talked about the place of _indios,_ the purest Filipinos and those of the lowest class in society. Sometimes, the friar did slip to his native Spanish that flowed so easily out of his tongue, especially when compared to the stilted Tagalog of a second ago.

But Levi didn’t mind, he had made sure to learn Spanish and Tagalog on top of his own native language a long time ago. In fact, he had made sure to learn it by matching every syllable and every vowel from each prayer, and eventually he did make sense of the letters on the missalletes during mass. Eventually as he did become a regular of the church, he did pick up a smattering of Spanish as the priests alternated between the two languages. And maybe he did pick it up overhearing some of the educated mestizos make their way out of their church after a long few hours of lectures and homilies.

When the words started to hold meaning, when the idioms and the overly tacky word choices started to make sense to Levi, when they had started to paint pictures in his head, make him feel things he had sworn he never felt before, Levi did come across one revelation that washed over him so violently, as if taking advantage of the loud yet monotonous homily of the priest in front of him and the stillness of the people that surrounded him.

 _Words are freedom._ And when Levi did realize words were freedom and that words had the power of telling stories he could never fathom experiencing first hand, he stumbled upon another realization.

He was trapped.

He was trapped by the dry seasons and the wet season which came with the routine of harvesting rice, leaving it out to dry and crushing the nibs to pull out the dried raw rice underneath. He was trapped by the taxes, the obligations to pay indulgencias to secure a place in heaven. He was trapped by the large bell in the center of town that would ring to call all the villagers to the square for another boring, compulsory yet unintelligible lesson by some other Spanish priest struggling between both their regional language and Tagalog.

Levi though had his words. He had the homilies worthy of reflection. He had the carefully crafted missalettes that came written in Tagalog and Spanish. And eventually when he did become a regular in their village church, he did catch the eye of a kinder priest who seemed to have also understood the importance of words.

A friar, who had caught Levi mumbling words one day, whispering spanish words, trying to pronounce the h’s, the f’s, the c’s, and the j’s on a missalette way past sundown. Father Erwin was a Spanish native who managed a small library at the back of the church, a small room to the back of his office. He seemed to have a hyper fixation as well with giving freedom to the native Filipinos and as it soon turned out, father Erwin believed in a form of freedom that came so naturally with education.

Erwin had been the reason Levi did not bat even an eyelash then as the Spanish friar slipped into his native tongue and took advantage of the intricacies of his language in ways a humble Indio would have never understood. Over the years, Levi had spent enough nights in Erwin’s office poring over missalettes, books, anthologies and ethnologies of the natives to have understood perfectly the friar’s sermon despite his own lack of formal education and his own humble background.

The words that had weaved pictures of a heaven while at the same time implicitly insulting the indolent Filipino natives, left Levi feeling things like they always did. And the trapped feeling that only reared its ugly head then, a culmination of the insults of indolence, reminders of their own place in society and ‘encouragements’ to continue working for a place in that ‘heaven’ had Levi staying in the church even hours after the mass has ended, to at least get a taste again of the small freedoms that came with scanning through the worlds that occupied the ten feet tall bookshelves that lined the walls of the office at the back of the church.

He was sure the door would be locked though like it always was. Until Erwin arrived, all he could do was wait.

* * *

“Erwin,’ Levi said loud enough to at least catch the attention of the blond priest when he first heard his familiar footsteps pad across the cheap cement of the village church.

 _Father Erwin._ He knew the title was important. Erwin after all was an ordained priest. But since Levi did meet Erwin, the latter had never imposed on him any words like father. In the end the priest had come out more as a friend than an actual ‘father.’

“Ah, you’re here again,” Erwin said nonchalantly. As usual, he had no qualms at all with being called by his first name, even by an ordinary farmboy. “Looking for something else to read?”

“That’s what I go here for every time,” Levi said.

Erwin smiled and shook his head. “You really would have gone places with the right opportunities.”

It wasn’t a new comment. Erwin had said the same thing countless times before, mentioning stories about a decree to publicize education which had been shoddily executed in the more remote farming villages yet had been so unfairly implemented in the towns favored by the governor general, it had pushed at least the middle class Filipinos to new heights,

_With the right education, you might have even made it to Europe. You would have been one of them._

The Ilustrados _._ “The enlightened ones.” Erwin had mentioned them in passing too many times for them to have ever been irrelevant, the renaissance men, the writers, the artists and the educated elite. Usually though, the ones who did end up in Europe had grown up in the capital city to at least middle class parents. And their education was top notch even before that.

Levi’s starting line had been much farther to the finish line than theirs. Although his small village did have a small public school, Levi never got to attend, having had to work the fields daily to pay for the medicine for his sick mother growing up.

His own education had been something he had to bolster his own initiative to grasp for, during late afternoons and nights after long days in the field or in between the odd jobs that helped finance his daily necessities.

As Levi soon realized due to hearsay, the quality of the education hadn't been top notch either. All the teachers were friars and most native Spanish friars turned out to be natural gatekeepers of both the Spanish language and culture. They refused to teach them Spanish at all, conducting all their lectures and classes in shoddy attempts at Tagalog or regional languages. Erwin had been different, an odd exception who seemed to value education over some misguided patriotic motivation. And Levi had recognized that as an indelible part of him over the years.

As Erwin unlocked the door to his office, he mentioned something about having stopped by the post office.

“I had another student back when I was made a parish priest of one of the larger dioceses in Manila. She’s in Europe now but she likes to send letters every now and then.” He brought out a letter, pointing at an unfamiliar postage stamp on the front, in some combination of letters Levi could not pronounce or make sense of. “Looking at the postage stamp, she must have sent this from Germany.”

Levi wasn't too surprised Erwin was receiving letters like that. He had been a good teacher to him. He was sure there existed other students who would have wanted to keep in contact with him too. Levi would bet Erwin kept correspondences with most if not all his students.

Erwin was quick to immerse himself in the letter. While he read, Levi busied himself looking through book after book on the shelves.

Erwin kept a collection of books in different languages, he kept a few dictionaries on the native languages in the Philippines having worked as a parish priest in different regions. Surprisingly, he seemed like a fan of the literary works of the native Filipinos. As Levi realized soon after he had started frequenting Erwin’s office, Erwin had shelves dedicated to literary works by Filipino authors, and even epics from pre-colonial times. Some of them in languages Levi didn’t even understand.

Erwin had had enough years and enough experience to pick up Tagalog and many of the other regional languages among the other islands in the Philippines. Levi had to admit, Erwin did have a good handle on both Tagalog and the common language of their area.

Both languages had proved useful after all the countless times he did hold masses as the parish priest of the small church in their province, a fair distance from the capital city Manila yet a fair distance from the central Luzon regions where another language was most widely spoken. In his own remote village, most people in his own town didn’t speak Spanish after all. Although most spoke Tagalog, only those who frequently went down south to the nearby Tagalog provinces or the capital city of Manila spoke and understood well enough to make sense of the half the literary works in those rooms.

Levi though had grappled with the intricacies of both languages over the years, making sure words and grammatical patterns in both those languages would paint pictures in his head, have him appreciate sensations and experiences he would have never felt if it wasn’t for the books. His own native tongue had been the one most commonly spoken in the central region of their island, his mother having been his companion for most of his life and having been most comfortable with their own provincial language.

It had been years though since his mother succumbed to her illness and it was only a few years after his own mother died did he run into Erwin. Those days when it was just the two of them in the office, Erwin would fall back to his own native tongue Spanish.

It was a small favor for Levi and either way Levi would have requested it. The Spanish language opened doors for him. And the number of shelves in Erwin’s office that were dedicated to novels and ethnologies from Spain and the Latin American colonies were more than enough proof for that.

Despite the hopeless situation of education in his own hometown, Levi eventually learned there were Filipinos out there, particularly those in Manila who did become adept in the Spanish language. In Manila and in some of the southern Tagalog regions closest to Manila, although Tagalog reigned supreme as the lingua franca, Spanish had become an irremovable part of the daily lives of the Filipinos.

It had been through the literary pieces, through the reports he poured through picking up grammatical pattern after grammatical pattern, word after word only to find out in a final author’s note towards the end of the book or the poem that it had been someone just like him, a Filipino just like him, who had weaved together all those Spanish words and sentence patterns so tightly yet so deftly like a skillful seamstress.

Every time, he had gotten lost in them and every time he wished those stories would never end.

"Levi, if you like poetry, you might want to read this one."

Although Levi had been neck deep in the ethnology on native Cebuanos, he was quick to pull out. He hadn't expected Erwin after all to call his attention when it was still too early in the afternoon to go home.

"Read what?" Levi asked, looking back at Erwin.

Erwin waved in front of him the two wads of paper which Levi quickly surmised came from the envelope that was ripped open on the desk.

"I thought you’d want to read this. An ilustrado wrote a beautiful piece about the flowers in Europe."

Erwin handed out the papers to Levi and the latter hesitantly went for both, still unsure whether Erwin would have been okay with him reading through the whole letter.

As Levi held on to both pages, Erwin did not hesitate to let go. _So it is okay to read through it then._ Levi thought to himself as he shuffled the pages, looking for the date and header.

_Dearest Father Erwin..._

The first pages were a letter which Levi quickly scanned though. He had to hold in a gasp at how easily the words flowed, almost reminiscent of the Spanish novels he had spent afternoons pouring through and not at all like the Spanish he would hear among the mestizos here. The writer had a way with words. They had the talent of picking the right moments to put complicated words without at all sounding pretentious.

If half way through the letter, the writer didn’t suddenly switch to straight Tagalog, in an attempt (which had proved successful) to express their own bout of nostalgia, their homesickness and their longing to return home, he probably would have never even known it was a fellow Filipino who had written the letter.

He reached the last page of the letter to find that once again, the writer had switched to writing in Spanish.

The writer had ended the letter with a poem and as Levi scanned from the top of the page, he didn’t even notice he had let out a breath as the blocks of paragraphs worth of narrations and experiences had morphed into lines organized into smaller blocks, a format which was both familiar and intriguing.

He had read enough poems after all.

_As promised, here is a poem that has been passed around among the Filipinos in Europe. It made me miss my homeland a little more so I felt the need to add a little more to it and share some of it with you._

_This was a long letter and I’m conscious it probably took a lot of your time. I hope though you can at least enjoy how much your student has learned from you._

_Sincerely, your student (always will be),_

_Hange Zoe_

Levi didn’t think too much of that last few sentences. He had already felt it in the smatters of Spanish and Tagalog that flowed so freely together in the letter. He had felt the nostalgia, the homesickness, the longing for their homeland.

Even so far away from her homeland, it was as if she felt trapped.

 _But how could someone studying so far away from their homeland be trapped?_ Levi had ended up asking himself. From what he knew, the ilustrados were freely travelling Europe, learning about their world, widening perspectives. They were experiencing what he had only ever seen in books.

_¡Id á mi Patria, id extranjeras flores, sembradas del viajero en el camino…_

* * *

_Go to my country, go, O foreign flowers,_

_sown by the traveler along the road,_

_and under that blue heaven_

_that watches over my loved ones,_

_recount the devotion_

_the pilgrim nurses for his native sod!_

If Hange hadn’t looked at the calendar nor had she started making it a habit to put a date on a diary as she wrote, she probably would have never believed that Aprils could be so chilly yet so colorful.

Aprils back in her home island were harsh, with temperatures hot enough to cook an egg out on the worst days. The colorful flowers that bloomed along the banks of the Neckar river accompanied by the chill should have been a welcome improvement to the biting yet wet and sticky heat that came with the cruel Aprils in her tropical homeland.

Yet, Hange had somehow felt a melancholy as she counted the colors and the hues that lined the greens in the trees.

 _There is beauty in reminiscing. In that beauty though, there is also sadness._ And Hange saw it particularly then, and she had felt it when she had wondered for herself how she could make her family and friends back home see the beauty of the new world that stretched out much wider than the big city in what turned out to be a small island where she had grown up.

She had never been able to articulate that bout of sadness that was a little difficult to shrug off. It had always gripped her everytime she did stop to admire views and contemplate experiences in between long nights of drinks, long nights studying and of course, long nights with her fellow patriotic students discussing the fate of their country.

It was Mike, one of her closest friends who had brought up the poem that had been shared among the other ilustrados. He had done it months before. But Hange did not think too much of it then. Not until she did have the opportunity to visit the city of Heidelberg and walk along the icy Neckar river. Not until she could see for herself the ‘flowers of Heidelberg.’

_Go and say say that when dawn_

_opened your chalices for the first time_

_beside the icy Neckar,_

_you saw him silent beside you,_

_thinking of her constant vernal clime._

_Say that when dawn_

_which steals your aroma_

_was whispering playful love songs to your young_

_sweet petals, he, too, murmured_

_canticles of love in his native tongue;_

And Hange did find herself saying the stanzas out loud as she entertained the nostalgia, the unexpected guilt at having such a view before her. She did find herself making rounds along the areas that were dotted with the most colors and a few times, she did bend down to pick up her favorite petals, those which, despite the most uneven edges tended to form the most beautiful shapes.

_And tell of that day_

_when he collected you along the way_

_among the ruins of a feudal castle,_

_on the banks of the Neckar, or in a forest nook._

_Recount the words he said_

_as, with great care,_

_between the pages of a worn-out book_

_he pressed the flexible petals that he took._

Hange had ended up cutting that walk short, retiring back to her old apartment, a few hours before the sun was expected to set. It could have been that wave of melancholy that had washed over her admiring such a beautiful view. It could have also been the fact that since she did start to notice the way the homesickness consumed her that she had been feeling colder. Her logical brain had decided then to attribute it to the fact that it was past noon already and the sun was starting to make its journey back down.

But her heart knew otherwise. And the emotions that transcended beyond what her brain could even fathom then, carried something else. It carried with it bursts of motivation, a sudden need to take the pen from along the side of her bed and along with it a parchment paper from her drawer. It had her writing her own final stanza towards the bottom of the poem.

And after that, she had started writing a letter, to that someone who would be most likely to understand the homesickness then. To that someone most skilled to understand both her emotions that were too difficult to package in one single language.

Her brain was offering smatters of her emotions in Spanish but her heart was offering its own feedback in her native language.

 _Sincerely, your student (always will be) Hange Zoe._ It could have been hours or it could have only been minutes. By the time Hange looked up again at the sky outside her window, it was still too blue. Her day was far from over.

She took the petals she had pressed to her diary. She let her lips curl up a bit at the red dye and yellow dye that had rubbed off on the pages of her diary before she took the petals and inserted it into the letter she had folded.

She made another trip before the sun finally set. To the post office only a few blocks away from her small apartment.

As she stuck the postage stamp and dropped it in the mailbox, she found her reciting one of the stanzas again, her superstitious self only hoping that whoever read it could share in those feelings too.

_Carry, carry, O flowers,_

_my love to my loved ones,_

_peace to my country and its fecund loam,_

_faith to its men and virtue to its women,_

_health to the gracious beings_

_that dwell within the sacred paternal home._

* * *

Levi ended up bringing home the letter, the poem and the two withered petals on Erwin’s desk. At first he had only requested the poem. Having borrowed other books before, it hadn’t seemed like an odd request at first, even if it was part of a personal letter to Erwin.

Erwin didn’t seem at all adamant about the whole letter being sent to him. Levi could have also sworn when he did ask that there had been a subtle smile on Erwin’s lips as he nodded his head.

As Levi lay on his ratty excuse of a bed for the night in his shanty house that overlooked miles and miles of rice fields. As he looked through the letter one more time and the wilted petals with the help of the dim flame of his oil lamp, he recited that last stanza.

_But O you will arrive there, flowers,_

_and you will keep perhaps your vivid hues;_

_but far from your native heroic earth_

_to which you owe your life and worth,_

_your fragrances you will lose!_

_For fragrance is a spirit that never can forsake_

_and never forgets the sky that saw its birth._

The wilted flowers he had placed on the floor in front of him surprisingly hadn’t lost its scent yet. Levi had to press it to his nose to remind himself that it had been from somewhere else but he swore it was still there. Oddly enough, he did feel some sort of sadness as well, only amplified by the poem he had just read for the tenth time that night and further appended by the fact that he was alone in his own small room in the middle of the night

The others who worked in the field lived in houses a little farther and if Levi closed his eyes maybe he could hear them. But it had always been him alone in the house since his mother died and it wasn’t worth it all to listen for company elsewhere when the company was never his after all.

Levi rolled closer to the oil lamp, setting the poem next to its dim light. If he couldn’t find company elsewhere, he might as well find it in the letter. And maybe for a second, play pretend that the letter had been for him.

The scribbles at the bottom were a little messier than the stanzas. They were so haphazardly squeezed into the margins of the neatly written poem and they felt organic. And consequently, something so human had ended up being a source of comfort to Levi so late in the night.

If Levi hadn’t been too sleepy, he probably would have noticed his mouth curl up into a smile. And maybe he would have noticed the way the words had so easily morphed into images despite the horrible penmanship that was only illuminated by the dim light of the oil lamp.

He had been too busy though falling asleep to musings of childhood nostalgia and homesickness. In his dreams, he could so easily pretend they were his own.

* * *

_Please don’t forget oh flowers_

_When you step foot on my native land._

_Share with them, my longing and my desire for home,_

_Whisper to the Makahiya that I’ll tease their bashful leaves one again._

_Comfort the rice fields, remind them I’ll run through them and once again, pry the largest rice husks open again_

_Go to the forests and the glades, Call out to the nymphs and the dwarves, Tell them I’ll play with them once again._

_Journeys are never for good._

_I’ll be home one day._

Words and literature were reflections of life and they had their ways of touching people, lecturing and maybe leaving others inspired or scarred or many other emotions in between. The letter had done more than that. Having heard a little too much about the student from someone who had known her personally, having had the privilege of reading through personal reflections before reading the poem, Levi felt a little more of a connection to the work, and more importantly the name.

There was a name and an address on the upper right of the first page. And after staring at the page long enough, the desire and the longing did seem a little more tangible.

 _If you could ever call them tangible._ Yet nature had seemed on a mission to prove him wrong. The makahiya that lined the river banks, the rice husks that made up the yellows of the rice fields could have been alive and maybe a few times, they did start a conversation for him.

In those moments, in between routines of plowing the fields, Levi started to believe so. Instead of joining his fellow workers for lunch, maybe he had searched for a glade, he looked for trees with the highest roots or the largest branches where nymphs and dwarves were rumored to have lived.

The makahiya plants called out to him. The rice husks rubbed off on him a little profoundly to have been anything too easily brushed off as he worked on the fields. And he had started to spend a few minutes a day in the forests, walking through the roots that spread out on the ground. He spent lazy afternoons and siesta times holding on to the gnarly branches of the trees, looking for anything that could pass for a whisper or a footstep.

When someone felt such longing for such, maybe they could be alive, maybe they did feel the same things. It could have been his own imagination playing tricks on him then.

But Levi could have sworn then, just as she had implied in her poems, they did respond. Levi never could have explained how they did it. Before he knew it, he was walking a few more rounds around the rice field. He started to touch on the small makahiya grass that grew on the shores of the river bank, mesmerized by how quickly they would close at the gentlest touch, as if he were five years old again.

And eventually he did start to hear them and feel their presence in the forest. As the blowing of wind that could be mistaken for whispers and the rustle of leaves that could have been footsteps.

 _Tabi tabi po._ Excuse me for trespassing. He had never been superstitious, yet in the silence and in the isolation, he found himself whispering pleasantries to the wind and to the rustle of leaves.

In the words, in the wonder and the sensations that followed, in the way his own imagination had spun dream-like visions into existence, Levi saw freedom. And the second hand desire and the longing which had rubbed off on him never left, a catalyst to that bout of freedom never left. Even a week after he had given back the letter to Erwin and borrowed another book to pass the time with, he found himself unable to distract himself with anything else.

Levi never forgot the address, he had kept a small piece of parchment paper next to his bed, under the oil lamp, promising himself to send something her way. One week after that, he had worked enough odd jobs in between the farming to afford a postage stamp. During the one Sunday after church and a short visit to Erwin, he did drop an envelope into the mailbox in town, addressed to one Hange Zoe.

It had been a little bulky and Levi had been almost worried it wouldn’t have slipped through the small slit. He had slipped in a few Makahiya leaves from the shores of the river, a few dry rice husks and a few leaves from the forest.

 _The flowers sent your message. The makahiya, the rice husks, the nymphs, they all heard you_ r cries. He found himself whispering as he held the envelope a little tighter in his hands.

 _Would she get the message?_ The address would probably be one she barely recognized. But Levi’s desires at that moment were simple.

As he dropped the mail and made the hour long walk back to his own humble home, he started to think that as long as she received it, at the least, as long as she knew that someone was listening, maybe he could deal with never hearing from her again.

For one week he did expect. The long afternoons in Erwin’s office had been a source of comfort and little freedoms. Work and routines had drowned out any hopes of freedom elsewhere.

For a while he did forget and for a while he didn’t expect a reply.

Until someone did visit, dropping a mail a little bulkier than the one he had sent almost a month ago. Upon checking the return address at the top of the envelope, he soon realized he didn’t need time to recall anything. He still memorized that return address a little too well.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, feedback is very much appreciated.
> 
> Note: The poem is a real poem written by an ilustrado during the Spanish occupation (the most famous one at that), the original poem is called 'to the flowers of Heidelberg


End file.
